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London Book Launch: 'Another Sun' by Françoise Vergès and Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro

When: —
Venue: Birkbeck Clore Management Centre

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“Against isolation, sitting with friends. Against emptiness, reading poetry. Against melancholy, playing with children. For every poison, an antidote.” —Françoise Vergès, 'Another Sun' 

Waiting at Martinique Aimé Césaire International Airport, in the city of Le Lamentin, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro browses the airport kiosk. Alongside books by Césaire, it offers titles by Frantz Fanon, Maryse Condé and Patrick Chamoiseau. She picks up a copy of Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai, a conversation between Françoise Vergès and Césaire published in 2005, and embarks. In 'Another Sun', Rodríguez Castro and Vergès revisit that seminal conversation, resulting in an eclectic text shaped by ongoing struggles. 

With poems by Danielle Legros Georges, Wole Soyinka, Ishion Hutchinson, Clarisse Baleja Saïdi, Aimé Césaire and Jean Érian Samson.

Françoise Vergès will be in conversation about her book with Kevin Ochieng Okoth. 

Françoise Vergès is a writer, decolonial anti-racist feminist and curator. She is currently working on the fabrication of premature death, imperialism and anti-imperialism, the colonial roots of fascism, private property and racism. In parallel, she is working on a film about communist anti-colonial struggles on Réunion and in the Southwest Indian Ocean based on her parents’ personal archives and her own. Her recent publications include: Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism (2024); A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum (2024); A Decolonial Feminism (2021); The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism (2020); and Resolutely Black: Conversations with Françoise Vergès, with Aimé Césaire (2019). She has written documentary films on Maryse Condé and Aimé Césaire (both 2013) and was a project advisor for Documenta11 (2002) and La Triennale de Paris (2012). Vergès is currently senior research fellow at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation, University College London.

Kevin Ochieng Okoth is a writer based in London. He is the author of Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics (Verso, 2023) and a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. His work focuses on anti-colonial histories and the political economy of imperialism.

Doors open: 5.15 pm
Event starts: 5.30 pm

Followed by drinks and books for sale.

The event is organised by the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and supported by Open Society Foundations. 

The event will be recorded and livestreamed.

This event is free and open to all but registration is required. Please click on the 'book your place' link at the top of the page to secure your place. 

 

 

Contact name: Dr Elia Ntaousani - BIH Manager

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